Flickr Merges With Yahoo! ID

Like both Owen and Bryan, I don’t care much for this. First of all I can’t get ‘Heilemann’ as a Yahoo ID, since it’s already taken, so I have to fall back on another ID I made back when the dinosaurs walked the earth or make a new one. I know, it seems like a small thing, but that sensation of having been an early adopter of Flickr seems to have been stamped away with this merger…

Now before I launch into my second point, let me just say that I think Yahoo does do some things very well. Their image search for instance is—oddly—way beyond Google image search, and so I use it quite a lot.

Another thing is, I just don’t trust Yahoo as much as I trust Flickr. Yes, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, but I’ll bet you it is a hell of a lot harder for Flickr to touch the Yahoo ID user database than it is for them to touch the Flickr user database. And with 3500 images with accompanying metadata and comments tied up in Flickr, I really don’t want to feel insecure about my connection with Flickr.

And then of course there’s the fact that Yahoo just feels like a web 0.9 site. And that’s fine since I use it so very rarely. But juxtapose that with Flickr’s slickness and you have a problem. Now I move around on Flickr’s site while working with their tools, and when I want to edit my profile, what happens? That’s right, Yahoo interface hell. NOOoooooo… Also, I saw an option in my Yahoo ID interface which said ‘Ask for password’ and then I could choose between 10 minutes or so and 2 weeks… That had better not be what I think it is. Gamespot is already doing this, and it drives me crazy! (Andy, whom I trust to have his facts straight, says it ain’t so)

All in all, it’s seemingly a small thing, and I’m sure the benefits for Flickr as a company are great. But I nonetheless feel that not only have I lost some of my personal connection to Flickr, but the new Web also lost some of its youth power.